‘Morbius’ Director Daniel Espinosa Opened Up On Jared Leto’s ‘Long Hair, Tony Stark-y’ Portrayal Of The Living Vampire

With Morbius now out in theaters and, uh, not exactly wowing critics (Or Martin Scorsese. Sorry, Tyrese.), director Daniel Espinosa has been an open book about the process behind bringing the film to life after it experienced a record-breaking amount of delays due to the pandemic. What’s become abundantly clear in these post-release interviews is that Espinosa is clearly a huge fan of Michael Morbius The Living Vampire, particularly the Marvel Comics character’s hey-day in the ’70s. It’s that love of the character that made him deliberate over how Morbius should look in his first film, and that includes getting Jared Leto‘s hair just right even though the actor basically looks like his usual rock star self.

“I think that he should be like the long hair, Tony Stark-y kind of person,” Espinosa told The Wrap before steering the conversation towards the debate on whether or not to use prosthetics or CGI to create Morbius’ vampire appearance, which involved some advice from Ryan Reynolds:

Yeah, but first we went to this idea that it would be prosthetics. Because I know Ryan Reynolds, we had done two movies before, so I called him because I knew that he was a big prosthetics guy, that he really liked what he did on “Deadpool.” And who doesn’t love “Deadpool”

And so we started with prosthetics, but the hard thing with Morbius is that his look is that his nose goes back. There were like parts of the look of it that has to do with negative space, that you can’t really do that with prosthetics. Then we had to consider if we’re going to do the head extra-large.

Ultimately, Espinosa was talked into going the CGI route by his VFX supervisor, who worked on Thanos’ face for The Avengers movies and said that he could deliver something even better because the tech had already improved so much. To Espinosa’s surprise, Sony ponied up the extra cash, and Morbius‘ got his photorealistic “pig nose” that fans of the comic will easily recognize.